I have the throttle action of my game mapped to 3 buttons. I have to do 3 calls to know whether any of them are down. I also see these calls show up in the profiler, where the take like 2% of my frame. Which is a bit much imo.
It would be nice to get the entire button state as a 32bit number in Lua, which I can then mask further as desired. It could even include the crank position I think.
How exactly are you doing this? Iād also double check the calls themselves are taking 2% of the frame and not something inside that call.
You could try to use input handlers which requires no queries: Inside Playdate
Building of the above reply, you could almost certainly use the input handlers to manage a button state bitmask if that works best for your game.
Just FYI, you can check also multiple inputs in one call:
playdate.buttonIsPressed( playdate.kButtonA | playdate.kButtonB )
It will return true if either A or B are pressed.
Also the query function are very lightweight so it shouldn't take 2% of your updates.
Excellent!
Then I'll downplay this feature request to update the documentation with an example 
playdate.buttonIsPressed(button)
Returns true if button is currently being pressed.
button should be one of the constants:
[..]
Could also mention the example usage by @Nic
I've also added playdate.getButtonState() to match the C API, since it took about five minutes total, including documentation and filing the MR.